On political hiring (and firing)

3. Well, a couple of lawmakers are pretty angry with me for replacing … at-will political appointments … it is my prerogative, my right, to appoint members whom I believe will do best for the people whom we are serving. So I look forward to any kind of investigation or questions being asked because I’ve got nothing to hide. Palin or Bush?

4. You want somebody who can do the job. That’s the most important criterion, somebody who is qualified, somebody who can get a job done. And on this particular issue, the one you’re referring to, they serve at my pleasure … There had been no credible evidence of any wrongdoing … And there will be more hearings to determine what I’ve just said. Bush or Palin?

On the fourth estate

5. [The media] hasn’t always been fair to me … I would say, at first, I intrigued people. And now I think we’re settling into a traditional relationship with the liberal media … My only answer is, I’d rather be underestimated. Palin or Bush?

6. I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. Bush or Palin?

On experience, and why it doesn’t matter

7. I don’t have 30 years of political experience under my belt … that’s a good thing, that’s a healthy thing. That means my perspective is fresher, more in touch with the people I will be serving. I would use that as an advantage. Palin or Bush?

8. I think that’s the old … game of trying to tear somebody down. I’ve been through this before. “Can’t possibly do the job. Never held office.” And my answer then was “Give me a chance. Give me a chance to lead” … If you want somebody who has had — you know — life experiences that may not be — conforms to the Washington mind-set — give me a chance. Bush or Palin?

On sweet, sweet crude

9. To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of world energy supplies … or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia … or that Venezuela might shut off its oil deliveries … we Americans need to produce more of our own oil. Palin or Bush?

10. Oil prices have risen sharply, and that increase has been reflected at American gasoline pumps. Now much of the oil consumed in America comes from abroad … Some of that energy comes from unstable regions and unfriendly regimes. This makes us more vulnerable to supply shocks and price spikes beyond our control — and that puts both our economy and our security at risk … Our nation must produce more oil. And we must start now. Bush or Palin?

Answers

1. George W. Bush

2. Sarah Palin

3. Sarah Palin

4. George W. Bush

5. George W. Bush

6. Sarah Palin

7. Sarah Palin

8. George W. Bush

9. Sarah Palin

10. George W. Bush

Which means that, on top of everything else it represents, the current presidential election is something like an ad agency review — a chance to put a set of potential stewards for “Brand America” through their paces, to see the creative and strategic directions in which they’d take our product.

What’s at stake is more than just popularity. As Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of the globe’s second-largest ad agency, DDB Worldwide, notes, “How we’re perceived in the world has profound implications. We rely on human intelligence to alert us to threats: We need friends willing to whisper in our ear that someone’s planning to blow up jetliners … Economically, the Commerce Department estimated that we’ve lost over $100 billion in tourism revenues since 2001. For every share point we lose in that sector, you’re talking about $12.3 billion and 150,000 jobs, gone! The bottom line is that we need a world that likes America.”

Candidate	Slogan	Unifying Theme	Underlying Values	If He/She Were a Brand…
Hillary Clinton	The Strength and Experience to Bring Real Change	“I’ve been there”	Competence; experience; professionalism
John McCain	Straight Talk Express	“I’ll go there”	Resilience; candor; courage
Barack Obama	Change We Can Believe In	“I’ll take you there”	Inspiration; inclusion; iconoclasm
Mike Huckabee	Faith. Family. Freedom	“Let’s go back”	Earthiness; populism; humility

Given the beating our image has taken during the last eight years, getting back to “like” is an uphill climb — but not an impossible one. Over the past six months, I’ve seen this process firsthand, as part of a team of researchers exploring the tarnishing of America’s “brand” in the global marketplace. The word from our network of immersed observers in 14 countries: Even as American politics and policies have become a lightning rod for global anger, America’s core underlying values retain their appeal. The problem is that, in the eyes of millions of people around the world, we’ve simply stopped living up to them.

“The virulent strain of anti-Americanism we’re seeing now can be ascribed directly to the fact that we’ve reneged on our promise to the world,” says Dick Martin, former executive vice president of public relations for AT&T, and author of the book “Rebuilding Brand America.” “That’s why it’s ultimately a branding problem. At its root, a brand is a promise. KFC is a brand that promises finger-lickin’-good chicken; America is a brand that promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But unlike KFC, we’re not delivering.”

“Brand America needs a relaunch,” says Reinhard. “And this year, this election, is the best opportunity we’re going to get.”

Convention holds that presidents need at least 100 days to find their footing, establish their policies, and shift the nation out of the previous administration’s inertia. But observers point out that because this cycle’s presidential contenders are the most cleanly packaged and clearly differentiated since Kennedy and Nixon, America’s makeover will begin even before inauguration. As soon as a winner is announced on Nov. 4, 2008, he or she will, for all intents and purposes, be Brand America.

So which of the candidates has a brand that best addresses the perceived deficits in our country brand?

Is it Brand Clinton, the name you can trust; familiar, experienced and rich with the mmm-mmm-good aroma of America’s last big boom? Or Brand Huckabee, whose folks ‘n’ faith message promises down-to-earth values combined with hands-to-heaven purity? Is it Brand McCain, tough enough to get it done, an off-road vehicle unafraid of both traffic and muck. Or, perhaps, Brand Obama — the think-different, just-do-it candidate who combines all-in-one packaging with big, streamlined ideas?

“Let’s look at what the world appreciates about us: Our youthful enthusiasm, our optimism, our diversity,” says DDB’s Reinhard. “And then, our negatives, which are very consistent across the world: No. 1, the perception that we are exploitative — we take what we want, and don’t give back in fair measure. Two, that we’re corrupt — we promote values that are not in concert with the social mores or religions of others. And three, that we’re arrogant: We’re self-absorbed, we’re loud, we’re rude.” To fix our nation brand, Reinhard suggests we need to steal a page from Johnny Mercer: “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”

Although his campaign has largely been written off as quixotic, Brand Huckabee has some unexpected merits, notably a certain self-deprecating humility that’s missing from the other candidates’ personas. “I was in Frankfurt a few weeks ago, at a panel about the U.S. elections hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce, and that day, the International Herald Tribune had run an article about Huckabee’s sense of humor, and about how it’s become such a part of his brand,” says Reinhard. “And even the Germans were acknowledging, when it comes to personal style, you have to give him full marks.”

Branding consultant Patricia Martin, author of “Renaissance Generation: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer,” agrees: “Huckabee is what I’d call a ‘compassion brand,’” she says. “He’s a man of the people. He laughs, and people laugh along. He makes people feel comfortable.” (On the other hand, notes Dick Martin, “Huckabee’s religious demeanor gives the world pause; it’s hard to underestimate the degree to which people outside of the U.S. are confused by our approach to religion. It bewilders people that more people believe in the Virgin Birth in the U.S. than in the theory of evolution.”)

The ability to soften the die-cast lines of pre-scripted identity, to engage with humor and spontaneity rather than reason and rhetoric, have only belatedly become a part of Brand Clinton — and, note commentators, perhaps too late and too halfheartedly to save her campaign. “Hillary built herself into an ‘anxiety brand,’ a brand that depends on uncertainty or fear to succeed; the whole appeal of familiarity and experience is rooted in this notion that the unknown is frightening,” says Patricia Martin. “And when it was clear that that wasn’t working, she was able to get some traction by exposing her emotions — by laying out a little compassion. But her brand was out there so early and already established so solidly that it hasn’t been enough to right the ship.”

And while Clinton’s aura of competence and professionalism (not to mention the global popularity of her husband) would smooth out some of the rough, clumsy edges of America’s current global image, her brand would inevitably feel more like a retread than the reinvention the world is hoping for. “Even the fact that Hillary is a woman isn’t going to be seen as a significant breakthrough,” says Harvard Business School professor John Quelch, author of “Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy. “Many countries have already elected and been led by women, so this is simply America playing catch-up rather than a statement of change in the cultural mind-set. There’s also that lurking suspicion overseas that, had she not married as she had, she wouldn’t have gotten as far as she has.”

Brand McCain is even more squarely planted in the “anxiety brand” space than Clinton: His straight-talking, muscular-contrarian persona (not to mention his shoot-from-the-lip rhetoric about a “hundred-year occupation” of Iraq) are designed to make him look strong, firm and unyielding in the face of challenge. The problem is that from abroad, “unyielding” looks a whole lot like “arrogant,” while “maverick” translates into “unilateralist,” both of which are fundamental sore points in the way America has presented itself to the world over the past eight years.

Being anointed Brand Bush’s heir via endorsements from both H.W. and W. only exacerbates global fears that McCain is the same-old, same-old candidate — accent on the “old.” “For McCain, age is a brand attribute he can’t control,” says Mark Newsome, senior vice president and CMO of marketing agency Chernoff Newman. “He’s in his 70s, and as much as that’s an asset as far as experience and wisdom is concerned, he can’t help being seen as the kind of status-quo patriarch that just isn’t going to play in 2008 like it did eight or 10 years ago — especially if he’s up against a 46-year-old opponent.”

Which brings us to the candidate that marketers universally agreed has the secret sauce that Brand America needs to regain its appeal.

“From Day One, Obama was talking about how we have to think outside of the Beltway box — how we need to enact positive change in a fresh way,” says Siegel + Gale’s Alan Siegel. “His brand is about uplift, it’s about humanity; he uses the pronoun ‘we’ so naturally. People knock him for style over substance, but the truth is that he just has a tremendous ability to cut through the noise. He’s distilled his brand proposition into a single theme, ‘authentic change,’ and it has resonated with people both here and abroad.”

While change — the notion of a break with the past — is central to Obama’s brand essence, the other values he incorporates are no less important. “Obama represents a lot of what America stands for, at its best: Diversity, opportunity, community,” says Dick Martin. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when asked about his qualifications, he talks about being a community organizer; he’s emphasizing that his experience is in bringing people together. I think, strictly from the point of view of changing attitudes towards America around the world, electing him is the most powerful thing we could do. He’s the embodiment of the American dream. Having him as president would say to the rest of the world that America has renewed its promise.”

There’s another factor that Obama has in his favor, which no other candidate this cycle — or, for that matter, in American history — can lay claim to, and it might be summed up as “trade dress.” His name, his appearance, his parentage: All of these are factors that have an immediate, visceral impact, even to those who know nothing else about him. Pundit Andrew Sullivan, guesting on “The Colbert Report,” summed it up as follows: “Just show the face of Barack Obama on television to some teenager in Lahore, Pakistan, who has a vision of America that’s been determined by the Bush-Cheney years, and suddenly, more than any words, his opinion and views of this country will change.”

For Obama, this advantage is almost unassailable. Short of announcing Tiger Woods as a running mate, none of his rivals has a way to force a recalibration of America’s image through peripheral attributes alone. It’s a big reason why he’s captivated global attention, to an extent that Americans might not even be aware. Indeed, the very things that snipers from the right have used to cast doubt on Obama’s red-white-and-blue propers — his schoolboy years in Indonesia, his refusal to engage in acts of symbolic patriotism, his stated willingness to sit down and engage with enemy world leaders, even the Drudge-distributed image of Obama in native Somali garb — these are the things that have the world trembling with anticipation over an Obama victory in November.

“I was just in Doha, Qatar, for the Brookings Institution’s annual U.S.- Islamic World Forum, and one of the moderators asked the non-Americans in the audience, ‘If you could vote for one of the U.S. presidential candidates, who would you vote for?’” says Keith Reinhard. “The number of hands that shot up for Barack Obama far outnumbered those for anyone else. So in that part of the world, at least, there’s no question at all.”

And in other parts of the world as well. “In Germany, they’re fascinated with him, they call him ‘Der schwarze Kennedy,’ the ‘black Kennedy,’” says Dick Martin. “They feel he has the same aura about him.” In fact, just a few weeks ago, Germany’s leading newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran a cover feature on Obama, illustrated by a paired set of images — Barack on the left, JFK on the right — and asking whether America will “finally have the chance to be loved again.” The issue’s cover line raised the stakes to a new level: It read, simply, “The Messiah Factor.”

That’s because, in Europe, and in Asia, Latin America and Africa as well, the perception is that an Obama presidency represents the potential for catharsis after nearly a decade of frustration with the U.S. “Our brand has been hammered recently, but beneath the anger, there’s this underlying hope among people around the world that we can do better,” says Patricia Martin. “And we can. We reinvent ourselves. It’s what we’re known for: We’ve had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra. I think that’s why you have people in every country eating up every little turn in this election’s story. This election, the whole world is watching.”

Then came the word that the killer, this faceless stranger responsible for a crime of historic lethality, was Korean American, and the tenor of the messages changed dramatically. Suddenly, most of it was from Asian American friends and colleagues, with a fresh and unique range of concerns. Some expressed guilt, inexplicable and unwarranted, that a child of our community might be responsible for such mayhem: “As a Korean, I do feel partly guilty and responsible,” said CeFaan Kim, an associate producer at NY1 News. “Every person I’ve spoken to who’s Korean, and that’s a large number, feels the same way. It’s a cultural difference, but the fact that our community shares this feeling is simply fact.”

Some expressed reluctant empathy: “Ours is not always a forgiving culture,” said Jenny Song. “There’s a lot of pressure to make it in the top 5 percent — be it schools, jobs, society, etc.; we tend to have an overall closed culture in which you’re either ‘in’ or ‘out,’ with very little room for those who are a little different or don’t fit in with standard norms. I can’t help but wonder if there are certain aspects of our culture that may have compounded his feelings. I can’t help feel as though this incident is also a wake-up call for Korean society in many ways.”

And others wrote words of fear and alarm, decrying the constant representation of the Asian-born but American-raised perpetrator Seung-Hui Cho as a foreigner, pointing to blog postings attacking Asians as an inscrutable, unassimilable threat from within, and noting unconfirmed reports of backlash — a South Korean flag being burned in Fort Lee, N.J.; a Korean American student in Manhattan threatened by white classmates.

“Most of the perpetrators of mass school killings have been white,” said Paul Niwa, a journalism professor at Emerson College. “After those shootings, do you think white people felt guilty that the shooter was white? Do you think white people felt that since the shooter was white, that the shooter would give society a bad impression of whites? A shooter can be white and nobody thinks that race played a part in the crime. But when someone nonwhite commits a crime, this society makes the person’s race partially at fault.”

Reading these comments, I found myself caught in a dilemma. I want to think that race is not a factor in the toxic mix of rage and psychological disturbance that has occasionally discharged as this kind of violence. And, certainly, in most cases it isn’t: Teenage angst is colorblind, and the triggers for crimes like these have included parental abuse, schoolyard persecution, romantic obsession — phenomena that exist beyond culture or ethnicity.

But professor Niwa is right: When race enters the equation — when the perpetrator of a crime of this type is black, like “Beltway Snipers” John Allen Muhammad and his ward Lee Boyd Malvo, or Asian, like Cho — it rises to the surface and stays there, prompting inevitable discussions about whether “black rage” or “immigrant alienation” were somehow to blame; whether in some fundamental fashion, color of skin, shape of eye, or nation of origin lie at the seething, secret heart of such tragedies.

There have been two other widely reported school shooting sprees by Asian perpetrators. One of them, the case of University of Iowa exchange student Gang Lu, even served as the inspiration for Chen Shi-zheng’s new film, “Dark Matter,” which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. On Nov. 1, 1991, Lu, a promising, Beijing-born physics student, brought a pair of pistols into a department meeting and opened fire, killing five people and paralyzing a sixth, before shooting himself fatally in the head. A New York Times article on the film quotes Vanderbilt University physics professor James Dickerson as saying that Asian students are often the victims of “unstated racism” and the preconception that they are smart, hardworking and unlikely to complain. “As a result they wind up as cogs in the research machine and remain isolated from the rest of the community and the culture,” says Dickerson. “It’s something not widely discussed in the physics community.” It then goes on to quote Harvard math professor Shing-Tung Yau on the “high expectation” placed on children by Chinese families. “When they realize that they cannot achieve it, they get very upset,” he says. “They also compete among themselves severely.”

The other case is that of Wayne Lo, a Taiwanese-born student who moved to Billings, Mont., with his family at the age of 13, then attended Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Mass. Accounts of his case — which took place a little over a year after Gang Lu’s rampage, on Dec. 14, 1992 — carefully use his intelligence (he was accepted at Simon’s Rock on the W.E.B. DuBois Minority Scholarship!), his exquisite talent in classical music (he excelled on violin!), and his previous history as a quiet, unassuming individual to counterpoint his bloody rifle attack, which killed two and wounded four others. Here’s a typically lyrical quote, from a feature by the New York Times’ Anthony DePalma: “Only Mr. Lo knows what led him to turn away from the classical music he once loved and instead embrace the violent, discordant music known as hardcore, and a surly group of students who were equally entranced by it. Only he knows how the same fingers that danced with such agility and emotion over the strings of a violin could, as the police say, have pressed the trigger of a semiautomatic assault rifle, shattering the campus silence and ripping through several lives.” As with Lu, news reports also emphasized Lo’s foreign birth — sometimes implying, sometimes outright stating that Lo’s cultural difference may have led to his sense of isolation, of being disrespected, of social exclusion, and ultimately, to his deadly eruption.

The degree to which these paired memes — “smart but quiet” and “fundamentally foreign” — are repeated in the coverage of these two crimes is striking. In Lo’s case, it was enough to prompt attorney Rhoda J. Yen to write a paper titled “Racial Stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans and Its Effect on Criminal Justice: A Reflection on the Wayne Lo Case” for Boalt School of Law’s Asian Law Journal, in which she raises the theory that this racial imagery may have tainted Lo’s ability to receive a fair trial.

The reporting around Seung-Hui Cho seems to have followed the same through-line: Right here on Salon, Joe Eaton reported one of Cho’s high school classmates calling him “a quiet guy, a really, really quiet guy,” but also a “‘supersmart’ student known for his math skills.” Most news reports have also referred to him as a “resident alien,” a legally proper but semiotically complex term that seems to emphasize difference — while a “legal permanent resident” sounds like someone who belongs in this nation, an “alien” doesn’t even sound like he belongs on this planet. It’s a word that seems designed to be followed by “invader” — a phrase whose appropriateness is underscored by the pictures of Cho, scowling and fisting guns at the camera, that now stare out from every news site.

There’s no excusing Cho’s crimes, or those of Lu and Lo before him. All three were guilty of heinous acts, of ruining and ending lives, and merit no apology for what they did. The point of bringing up all three is not to defend them, but to ask whether media and society have too easily conflated them, bundling their individual cases in a convenient packaging that subtly evokes those hoary, oddly contradictory typecasts of the “model minority” whiz kid and invading “yellow peril.”

One contributor to the legal group blog De Novo, who actually attended college with Wayne Lo and was close friends with one of his victims, has gone so far as to draw a direct comparison between Cho and Lo. While acknowledging Rhoda Yen’s journal article and disavowing any intent to suggest that race was a primary reason for those two slides into murderous violence, “Dave” nevertheless notes that “across the board, college shooters seem to be males under some pressure for success, academic and/or sexual, which would seem to include many Asian males.” Dave then admits that this suggestion itself rests on a “model minority” stereotype. And that’s a quandary we often find ourselves in when invoking race here — or really, anywhere: It’s challenging to talk about it in a complex and constructive fashion, so it’s often tossed out, or put into play via crude and simplistic clichés.

Excluding race from the equation entirely eliminates some very real criteria we might use to better understand why acts like this occur, and how to perhaps prevent them in the future. Parental expectations among Asian Americans, particularly within immigrant families, are indeed great; racism and casual discrimination does exist; social isolation may be more likely if you’re in a situation where the people around you mostly don’t look like you or share your background.

Perhaps most important, there are wide differences between cultures in how mental illness is perceived, with Asian cultures largely rejecting the concept of psychological disorder as a disease — to the point of refusing treatment, ostracizing sufferers, and even suppressing discussion of the topic. Could this attitude, combined with a lack of culturally sensitive counseling, have resulted in the inner turmoil of Lu, Lo and Cho being overlooked or underplayed? “Asian immigrants are not as liberally educated about mental illness as others in the U.S.; they feel it is something strange, something you shouldn’t deal with or discuss,” says psychiatrist Dr. Damian Kim, who has practiced clinically for 35 years, and who has written a book on mental health for immigrants that is available in both Korean and English. “For them, seeking treatment is an indication that there’s something wrong with you.”

But focusing on race, particularly using the lens of stereotype, flattens individuality, and obscures other factors that are more meaningful and important. “Pressure for success, academic and/or sexual” isn’t in and of itself a reason for someone to go out and commit mass murder. I know hundreds of young Asian males who experienced that kind of pressure as adolescents, who grew up silent, studious and socially awkward; who were perceived as different, to the point of being excluded or taunted; who had unusual hobbies and obsessions — and who’ve never shot off anything except their mouths.

I’m one myself. While attending St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, N.Y., back in the mid-’80s, I worked on a student film with my equally weird friends called “Burnout,” a horror-comedy that recast our high school as “Sat-An’s School,” an institution run by a group of diabolical cultists who manipulate a young, misanthropic student to murder his peers and teachers in various silly and bloody ways. We launched the production with the cooperation of faculty and administration, some of whom played themselves. The film was never finished — SATs and parental expectations got in the way.

But I wonder, if I proposed that script as a high schooler today, a quiet Asian American male with few friends and odd interests, would I be automatically dropped into a box marked “potential spree killer”? And if I were tagged with that combination of model minority and yellow peril as a result, if I found myself surrounded by people appalled that a “good, quiet Asian boy” might write a gory slasher flick about a student maniac … would that help or hurt?